Grammar School: Agreement

by Meredy Amyx

Meredy is a recent retiree from a thirty-year career as an editor, the last decade of it in technical documentation at Cisco Systems. She currently freelances (http://meredyamyx.com) part time and is still in love with grammar.

Introduction

Grammar is about relationships. To use correct grammar is to put the parts of a sentence or utterance, both syntactic and semantic, in the right relation to one another.

That was the subject of the first installment of this series.

Now we’ll talk about one of the simplest of those grammatical relationships: agreement.

Agreement

Agreement is the term for a correct relationship between the number of a subject and its verb or the number of a pronoun and its antecedent.

In other words, it’s about singulars and plurals and making sure they match when they’re supposed to.

In English, agreement doesn’t really pertain to anything else, setting aside literal meanings such as “one child, two children” (not “one children”). In other languages there may be rules about agreement between nouns and adjectives in number, gender, and case, between articles and nouns, and so forth. In English it’s nowhere near as complicated, although there is still plenty of room for agreement to trip people up, such as in sentences like these:

1. If you specify the interface number, the details of that interface is displayed.

2. One of the configurations that uses this process are shown in the example.

Both of those contain errors. (See “Answers” below for analysis.)

For now, we’ll just talk about agreement between subjects and verbs.

Subjects and Verbs

The rule is simple. A singular subject gets a singular verb. A plural subject gets a plural verb. Nobody misunderstands this.

	singular	The administrator grants user privileges.
	plural	The administrators grant user privileges.
	singular	The message is forwarded.
	plural	The messages are forwarded.

So how does it get messed up? Here’s the brutal truth: we misidentify our subjects and verbs.

In a simple declarative sentence where the subject is a single noun or noun phrase followed by a verb, it’s not so hard. But as soon as we start complicating it, with compound subjects, or with modifiers and phrases after the noun, or with subordinate clauses (such as those with “who” and “which” and “that”) intervening between the subject and verb, we can easily lose track of the main parts and get distracted by some other element coming between the subject and verb.

3. Distributing the OAM processing to the line cards are enabled by default.

4. If one of the service activations fail, the system ignores all unprocessed messages.

5. This string is constructed near the submode handler, for example, the krypto_x command, via a called function or one of the referenced strings, and are then later parsed in the submode initialization function.

There’s an error of lack of agreement in every one of those examples.

The key to solving problems of subject–verb agreement is to pick out the verbs and find the correct subject for each one. From there it’s not hard to make sure they’re both either singular or plural. (See Answers.)

The Skeleton of
a Sentence

The bare bones of a sentence are the subject and verb. Every complete sentence has a verb, and every verb (except those in the imperative mood—i.e., commands) has a subject.

Verbs give themselves away because they are the doing words. Without them, nothing happens. Examine your sentence for where the action is, where an assertion is being made about something that’s going on—all the way from bare existence (is, are, were, am, and the other forms of to be) to the most vigorous activity—and you’ll find your verb. Then you must ask who or what is doing whatever the verb says, and that’s your subject. Everything else is built onto that skeleton.

Whether it’s the main verb in the sentence or any number of possible verbs in all kinds of additional constructions, it has a subject, and the subject must agree with the verb in being either singular or plural.

Train yourself to check every single sentence you write (or, if you’re an editor, every one you read) for the subject that goes with each and every verb. Once you’ve correctly matched up the subjects and verbs, it is a simple matter to check their numbers: singular–singular, plural–plural. Agreement.

Copyright © 2010 Meredy Amyx.